April 1, 2011

In a posting back in February, I relayed that development was virtually promising that Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 would be out sometime in March. I then padded that to be sometime by March 31. Here's what I was told from multiple sources (not one of which is Glenn Schwartzberg): apparently, development discovered two bugs during testing just this week. They are being immediately corrected and then the patch should release to manufacturing (meaning it can be bundled up and posted on edelivery.oracle.com).

This jibes with a public announcement that Oracle made during a Customer Advisory Board meeting in Copenhagen this week. A customer that was there told me that Oracle announced they were releasing 11.1.1.2 to edelivery on April 10. This is the first time I've ever heard of an exact date spoken in a semi-public forum.

No I think that the more likely date is April 11 (which is a Monday and as such, a lot more likely than Sunday). That said, the earliest I would expect it is April 11 since, well how do I put it gently, Oracle has been working this for around a year now and has lost pretty much all credibility with estimating patch release dates.

To add to the bad news, it looks like support for other application servers (like WebSphere) will NOT be in this patch. Looks like it will be delayed until to 11.1.2.2 (and who really believes that will really release by year-end?).

Really hope (and doubt) that WAS etc... will be added back as supported app servers for EPM in the near future since OBIEE 11g uses the WLS framework for security and OBIEE may become the de-facto portal homepage for the rest of the EPM suite. WLS is "embedded" in the current 11.1.2.x installer.

I don't see Oracle having to kowtow to other app server platforms since the EPM suite should be viewed holistically as a platform to itself and not a series of applications to be deployed.